{"id":75482,"date":"2025-08-17T17:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T17:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/75482\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T17:00:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T17:00:07","slug":"ai-has-created-a-new-breed-of-cat-video-addictive-disturbing-and-nauseatingly-quick-soap-operas-artificial-intelligence-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/75482\/","title":{"rendered":"AI has created a new breed of cat video: addictive, disturbing and nauseatingly quick soap operas | Artificial intelligence (AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the (tail) end of 2024, Billie Eilish sat cross-legged on stage and began to miaow.<\/a> Her fans erupted in harmony, each belting out an off-key miaow of their own. She knows, they realised! This is because Eilish\u2019s Oscar-winning track What Was I Made For? \u2013 a lachrymose Barbie cut lamenting adulthood\u2019s entailing ennui \u2013 has become the default soundtrack for a new breed of cat video.<\/p>\n

You may recognise it: the song often plays over the top of these AI-generated fantasias featuring a cartoonishly fat cat or an equally buff feline with a suspiciously veiny human body. The cat cheats on her lover, falls pregnant or seeks revenge in a weirdly condensed soap opera. And like all soap operas, these videos are extremely addictive.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one, for example<\/a>. While working an honest job, Mr Whiskers \u2013 wearing a red flannelette shirt \u2013 accidentally cuts his paw off while endeavouring to saw some wood into shape. He is fired (in fact, the signs around his warehouse explicitly state that all workers \u201cmust have two arms to work\u201d), his wife divorces him and he attempts to pick up the pieces of his hard-knock life in 30 neat seconds. It\u2019s all going swimmingly until his scorned ex-wife tries to kill him with an axe a little while later, but all is well \u2026 she falls into a puddle and humiliates herself.<\/p>\n

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In another, a baby falls into shark-infested waters and a muscly cat (in Capri pants, no less) pounds a great white to death before saving the baby, adopting it and bringing it home to his Beverly Hills mansion, where the two live happily ever after. Each story is neat, kitsch and nauseatingly quick \u2013 with millions of views.<\/p>\n

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The elephant-sized cat in the room of all of these videos is that Mr and Mrs Whiskers aren\u2019t necessarily \u2026 cats. They\u2019re kind of people, too. Moggies with rugged, athletic human physiques who occasionally live in mansions, drive convertibles and work corporate jobs. And yet, some \u2013 despite their seemingly exquisite set of circumstances and comically immaculate bodies \u2013 find themselves routinely grief-stricken, sick or in danger, as uncanny pop covers accompany their downfall.<\/p>\n

They find themselves pushed off ships, snared in house fires, drug-addled, arrested and bullied. This begs the question: are these videos 30-second cautionary tales? About affluence, betrayal, scandal and forgiveness? Are they Shakespeare by way of Neighbours meets Euripides? Are they biblical parables for our time?<\/p>\n

Each video<\/a> is signposted by a lurid domestic catastrophe: a useless father accidentally propelling his kitten into a ceiling fan (a particularly gruesome one, I must add), a cheating wife paying no heed to her husband\u2019s calls, a gaunt kitten who \u2013 after years of being teased \u2013 becomes suspiciously jacked. It\u2019s the hero\u2019s journey, only furrier.<\/p>\n

And they get dark \u2026 quickly. In one disturbing video<\/a>, a cat-lady is stuck in the antebellum South picking cotton before being lashed by a white cat in overalls. Each video is sickeningly gaudy, sometimes violent and always melodramatic. And even when other AI-generated animals feature, such as crazed eagles or depraved sharks, the cats maintain their human six-packs and two-legged swagger.<\/p>\n

In another<\/a>, \u201cLuigi Meowgione\u201d watches in pain as his cat-grandmother collapses in the grocery store. Her health insurance is denied at the hospital, so he faces up to the \u201cevil Corp Insurance\u201d company, scales it from the outside and fills the building with Catnip gas. Now that the security guards are incapacitated with a terrible case of the munchies, Luigi Meowgione is able to hack the system \u2013 and, by the end of the video \u2013 he discretely enters the CEO\u2019s office \u2026 presumably to seek revenge. We aren\u2019t to know, as part two hasn\u2019t yet been released.<\/p>\n

After all, the internet has always loved cats with human attributes. \u201cI can haz cheezburger?<\/a>\u201d is a phrase probably nobody wants to hear again. Grumpy cat<\/a> was funny because it was a cat who was grumpy. The question, then: are these miaow-miaow videos the final form of the anthropomorphic kitty \u2013 or are they merely copycats of history?<\/p>\n